After 19-year-old Alice Carrière tried to kill herself in three different ways in one night, a therapist asked her why she hacked at her limbs with knives. “I think,” she replied, “it’s because my parents believe we’re an exception to the rules. I can’t distinguish my thoughts about myself from my parents’ thoughts about me. I feel my arms and legs don’t belong to me.”
At times, while reading Everything/Nothing/Someone, I felt that the decision by Carrière – now 39 – to write it might be an ongoing act of self-harm. I’ve always felt that it’s healthy to let fresh air into private shame, but this memoir depicts almost too many appalling incidents to handle, the blame for most of which lies at the door of Carrière’s parents, the charismatic German actor Mathieu Carrière and the late, glamorous American artist Jennifer Bartlett. They were wealthy, talented and dangerously open-minded. After they divorced, as Alice turned 7, their sharply observant daughter clocked that “there were no rules in my father’s house because they didn’t apply to us and were meant to be broken anyway; there were no rules in my mother’s house because it never occurred to her to make them.”
